The Electricity Crisis in Venezuela: A Cautionary Tale

A serious drought has caused the water level in Venezuela’s Guri Dam to plunge, threatening a large portion of the nation’s electric grid.

Photograph by Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters

Last Friday, President Nicolás Maduro declared a sixty-day state of emergency throughout Venezuela. Alluding darkly to an American-backed plot against his regime, Maduro said that the new measure would help him protect his fellow-citizens from foreign and domestic threats, though he didn’t explain exactly how. There is certainly no denying that Venezuela is in dire straits. Inflation is so high that the government cannot afford to pay for the paper on which its currency, the bolívar, is printed. Lines at the grocery store grow longer even as the shelves grow emptier, and hospitals, such as they are, have run out of antibiotics, surgical supplies, and functioning medical equipment. The country’s electrical grid, too, is in a shambles. Planned blackouts roll through almost every region of the country daily, including the capital, Caracas, which has been estimated to have the highest murder rate of any city in the world. Early last month, Maduro announced a national furlough of public employees, instituting a four-day work week to conserve power; by the end of April, the week had shrunk further, to only two days. Time itself has been bent to the government’s needs, with the country’s clocks pushed forward by half an hour. Venezuelans will use all the daylight minutes they can get.

The main reason for these machinations, apart from long-term political mismanagement, is drought. There has been little rain in Venezuela in the past three years, and a crippling deficit last year in particular—a predictable effect of El Niño, the global climate cycle that periodically warms parts of the Pacific Ocean, causing deluges in Texas and Florida, warm weather in eastern Canada, and desiccation in Indonesia and parts of Latin America. As a result, the water behind Venezuela’s dams, which supply around two-thirds of the country’s electricity, is at a historic low. At the Guri Dam, the nation’s largest hydropower facility, the water is reportedly within five metres of dead pool. At this low level, the worry is that air will get into the dam’s inner workings along with the water, producing vibrations in the metal turbine blades that can rattle the structure to death. If Venezuela’s reservoirs run dry and its dams stop working, its grid will, too.

In an effort to conserve electricity, the Venezuelan government has instituted rolling blackouts and instituted a two-day work week for public employees, but the hydropower crisis continues.

Photograph by Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters

Beneath all the chaos that now characterizes daily life in Venezuela, one question rings forth: Why did the country with the largest fossil-fuel resources in Latin America, and among the largest on Earth, decide to generate its power with water, a notoriously unreliable substance? Contrary to what we might assume, in today’s sustainability-minded world, the choice did not arise from a noble commitment to renewable energy. The main reason that Venezuela has invested in hydro above all else is to preserve as much of its oil as possible for export. Yet power generation, and especially generation that relies on renewables, requires diversification; Venezuela has failed to design its electrical infrastructure in a way that accounts for the natural unpredictability of energy sources like hydro, solar, and wind. After the last bad El Niño drought, in 2010, the government did almost nothing to revamp. It commissioned a small number of diesel-fuelled power plants, which were slow to reach completion, and one new natural-gas plant, which can—but doesn’t—churn out four per cent of the country’s electricity. (In a particularly bitter Catch-22, the refinery that helps supply Venezuela’s gas plants with fuel is also powered by the Guri Dam.) The government has put all its eggs in one basket, twice over. It diversified neither its economy nor its electricity supply. The drop in oil prices that began in mid-2014 has emptied Venezuela’s mismanaged coffers, and the drought has sapped its power—the latter a particularly galling development, since the weather changes caused by El Niños have been tracked in Latin America since the seventeenth century, and by this point ought to come as no surprise.

Venezuela’s precarious situation is also due in part to the difficulty of stockpiling electric power. Electricity is a temporal product; unlike oil, it can’t be put aside for days or weeks or years. When a light switch is flipped in Caracas, the current that leaps to the bulb was likely, less than a second before, a drop of water behind the Guri Dam, four hundred and fifty miles away. As it passed through the dam, a turbine spun, tearing electrons from atoms and causing them to bump along, down cables and wires to the city, through the wall, past the switch, and into the bulb—a silent line of dominoes falling at nearly the speed of light. This arrangement doesn’t leave much wiggle room for water shortages. Less water means less power, right now. In countries with more modern energy infrastructures, the solution has been to balance different sources of electricity. In the United States, for instance, new wind capacity tends to be paired with new natural-gas capacity, so that when the weather changes and the wind stops blowing, fossil fuels can make up the difference. In places with a robust enough grid and the right sort of computerization, even solar can balance wind, and vice versa. But in Venezuela no such balancing exists, because most of the oil that is pulled up from underground is exported, and much of its plentiful natural-gas production is used to keep the oil fields pumping.

There is some historical precedent in the United States for what is happening to Venezuela’s power infrastructure. In April of 1977, President Jimmy Carter proposed a sweeping series of measures to deal with the nation’s ongoing energy crisis, itself a product of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo. Although the sort of privation and anxiety that Venezuelans are now experiencing was absent, it felt like lean times nevertheless. The government urged Americans to reduce their gasoline consumption by relying more on public transportation and car-pooling, and to make their homes more energy-efficient. As part of the same plan, the Carter Administration pushed for legislation that furthered diversification in the electricity sector—nuclear, solar, and hydroelectric development, which Carter then forced America’s notoriously tight-fisted utility companies to buy. Forty years later, as the United States slowly embraces more renewables, an awareness of the importance of this diversification remains. When any single source of fuel accounts for even a third of the power flowing into a grid, the security of that system is difficult to guarantee. At nearly seventy per cent hydro, Venezuela is running a catastrophically uniform system. It is time for the country’s government to figure out another way, not just the water way, to deliver electricity to its people, with the regularity of unmanipulated clockwork.

Gretchen Bakke is the author of “The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future,” forthcoming this summer from Bloomsbury.